A welcome rallying cry for preserving the nation’s musical heritage.
Five case studies illuminate the challenges and value of preserving musical landmarks.
As the music industry has undergone a profound paradigm shift in the 21st century, it has left a lot of history behind: small labels that released seminal music, studios where those classics were recorded, sessions so significant that they established one Southern town as “the Birthplace of Country Music.” If a culture commemorates battlefields and other historical sites, why not musical landmarks? The opening chapter of this insightful book by Dahan, a scholar at Middle Tennessee State University, tells a fascinating story of how Richmond, Indiana, became a recording hub for Gennett Records, attracting artists, from Louis Armstrong to Gene Autry, before it stopped releasing new music during the Great Depression. Both Richmond and the Gennett family moved on, and the adjoining pressing plant and piano factory had been all but abandoned. Demolition and repurposing of the 25-acre property appeared all but inevitable until a local journalist began writing about the history that would be lost. Public, governmental, and Gennett descendants helped put Richmond back on the musical map, establishing a Walk of Fame, a music festival, and building restoration. The King Records label in Cincinnati and Stax in Memphis both enjoyed higher profiles, but their facilities and the neighborhoods surrounding them had suffered from blight after they closed. After facing demolition, the former has awakened the city to the significance of the label that provided a springboard for James Brown and others, while the latter has finally seen its legacy preserved in a museum. Capricorn Records in Macon, Georgia, experienced a fall almost as dramatic as its rise (with the Allman Brothers) but has seen its studio given fresh life through a university partnership. Each chapter documents years of efforts—and the passion, persistence, luck, and deep pockets of financing—that are necessary in such efforts.
A welcome rallying cry for preserving the nation’s musical heritage.Pub Date: yesterday
ISBN: 9798855809527
Page Count: 242
Publisher: State Univ. of New York Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2026
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
